Comments for Carbon Fixated

Comment on Skeptics push back against climate “skeptics” by Länkar 2010-03-18

Länkar 2010-03-18 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:00:10 +0000

[...] Skeptics push back against climate “skeptics” [...]

Comment on Science in Budget 2010 by Gerry

Gerry — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:22:02 +0000

The quality of discourse is only exceeded by the stunts used by both sides to draw attention to themselves. Today, the British are pushing a meeting of Olympic athletes in Toronto to discuss climate change! Yeah, that should be science based — not.
Of course, the British High Commission in Ottawa is the same bunch that hired a cancer fund raiser to replace its media outreach on climate change. Media could only take so much exposure to gossip and social news before tuning out completely.

Comment on Science in Budget 2010 by CAM

CAM — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:34:23 +0000

More precisely Arctic infrastructure gets more funding, but one hopes that will lead to funding actual researchers. In the meantime CFCAS desperately needs renewing or replacing, and there’s no sign of that happening.
CCS gets a heck of a lot of cash, doesn’t it? Can’t help but think it could have been better spent elsewhere.

Comment on Science in Budget 2010 by Kate

Kate — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:53:01 +0000

It’s great that Arctic research gets more funding. I recently attended a presentation of the Circumpolar Flaw Lead Study by Dr David Barber….truly amazing stuff that they’re working on, but the amount of helicopter rides to get up there eats up a lot of government money.

As expected, no mention of mitigation or adaptation, except CCS research! Now he’s really sounding like Danielle Smith, the leader of the AB Wild Rose Party……On Rick Mercer she remarked that the science of gravity is settled while the science of climate change is not. That one really made me laugh.

Comment on Newtongate: the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘thinking’ by Erasmussimo

Erasmussimo — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:01:13 +0000

I am astounded that the deniers attempt to differentiate Newton’s laws from climate change science by arguing that “well, what Newton did was real science” whereas what the IPCC does is some kind of pseudoscience. Have any deniers actually read Principia Mathematica (Newton’s work on physics)? I have slogged through the entire thing and it is not at all as clear and simple as your high-school physics would have you believe. It is a huge mass of theorems, corollaries, and extensive calculations. He got some of those calculations wrong! (No big surprise — some of them are very lengthy and he didn’t have a calculator.) The theorems are extremely dense and I gave up trying to follow the logic on many of them — and I hold a master’s degree in physics! If you think that you could follow them, try it yourself. It’s really tough.

The physics you read nowadays enjoys the benefit of centuries of cleaning up, simplification, and different teaching strategies. Sure, it seems clean and simple, but it was nowhere near so clean and simple back then. There were complications and mistakes. I have read both IPCC AR4 and Principia, and I can state flatly that IPCC AR4 is clearer, better argued, and better supported than Principia.

Comment on Improving the Lives of Northerners: LPC Round Table by CAM

CAM — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:08:08 +0000

I don’t think there’s a connection. Canada has a pretty good network, it’s just a question of fit for purpose, and the Canadian network does its job. If you are talking about D’Aleo’s histrionics about GISS, Gavin Schmidt had this to say, which I think is relevant:

NASA: What about the meteorological stations? There have been suggestions that some of the stations are located in the wrong place, are using outdated instrumentation, etc.

Schmidt: Global weather services gather far more data than we need. To get the structure of the monthly or yearly anomalies over the United States, for example, you’d just need a handful of stations, but there are actually some 1,100 of them. You could throw out 50 percent of the station data or more, and you’d get basically the same answers. Individual stations do get old and break down, since they’re exposed to the elements, but this is just one of things that the NOAA has to deal with. One recent innovation is the set up of a climate reference network alongside the current stations so that they can look for potentially serious issues at the large scale — and they haven’t found any yet.

Comment on Phil Jones gives sensible answer to dodgy question, fuels Canadian trollumnists by CAM

CAM — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:44:45 +0000

This 'honest broker', 'third way' nonsense is just too unbelievable, really, especially from a reporter with such a loose grasp on the facts as Wente. For a middle position, she could try just honestly commenting on the science. Thanks for the comment, Jim. And if you like Daily Mash, don't miss this one.

Comment on Phil Jones gives sensible answer to dodgy question, fuels Canadian trollumnists by Jim Prall

Jim Prall — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:37:26 +0000

The “now what?” ending from Wente was particularly vapid. At least she is distancing herself from the rabid right’s claims that all science is a lie. But in between “a few lines in the thousands of pages of IPCC AR4 need to be corrected” and “all scientists are liars”, the is an awful lot of room for manoeuvre. I don’t think she makes the case she believes she has, which appears to favor some kind of “honest broker” neutrality or Lomborgism on the question of whether we need to reduce carbon emissions. She seems to think that a nice middle position would be “don’t get too alarmed, as the alarmists are asking.”
But would this not have exactly the same policy implications as “don’t believe a word all those lying scientists are saying” – i.e., do nothing, or at least delay until … what? Until the scientists find something more persuasive that the multi-thousand scientist IPCC process with its thousand-plus-page Assessment Reports with tens of thousands of footnotes? Until all right wing politicians and newspaper editors somehow drop their opposition to any policy response at all?

P.S. Great blog – I’ll link to it from mine. I especially appreciated your find of http://carbonfixated.com/trees-will-not-become-unstoppable-killing-machines-admit-climate-scientists/ I’m now hooked on DailyMash.

Comment on Improving the Lives of Northerners: LPC Round Table by Jim Prall

Jim Prall — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:21:01 +0000

I wonder if the funding shortfall for upkeep or staffing of Arctic research stations is in any way connected with the reported drop in the number of stations reporting current temperature data? You know, the one that Steve McIntyre wants to turn into another “-gate” climate cover-up, because … well, you ask him. He was also convinced there was a big cover-up because of recent trouble getting good weather data out of Bolivia.

Comment on Stephen Harper on Climate Change by Kate

Kate — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:38:52 +0000

So did his opinions change, or is he just trying to keep everyone happy because he knows a denier PM won't stay elected for long? [CAM: a little bit of both? Denialism plays well with a lot of Canadians, and it probably helped get him elected. The Wild Rose Alliance are on a similar path. For Harper, once in power, it was hard to keep on denying reality, and electorally advantageous to accept the reality of climate change, as it stole some ground back from Dion and the Green Shift. A 'Made in Canada solution', the PCs were calling it. The message here may be: you can vote in a climate change denier, but once in power, sooner or later they are just going to sell out and accept the science. Although they can still do their best not to do anything about it...]